[TowerTalk] HFTA first impressions

[Jim Lux]

Just got my new ARRL Antenna book, which I bought primarily for the copy of
HFTA.  Here are my first impressions..

1) Why must they provide nagware copies of software that have time limits?
I understand and support the concept of shareware, but, on the other hand,
it would have been nice if the ARRL blurb said: "limited functionality
versions of popular programs".  I wouldn't even mind getting developmental,
beta type software on the disk, providing it was disclosed up front.

2) The instructions on getting DEM data are mindbendingly complex and
confusing, especially with respect to properly installing it in the right
directories, etc.  The microDEM program is quite slick (probably too
powerful for this application, by the way), but all that capability means it
takes a lot of configuring.  A program like RadioMobile does this MUCH
better.

3) The instructions given for creating the terrain profile files do not
work.  The version of MicroDEM on the CDROM doesn't save the profiles
created in the viewshed analysis. It doesn't allow you to click the "save
radials" option, which is grayed out.  The HFTA pdf file tells you that you
can enter the lat/lon for the viewpoint once you have clicked on the DEM
data, but in reality, it's where the cursor is when you (double) click that
determines the viewpoint.

4) It would have been much better if they had simply provided a single
program that you enter the lat/lon of the station, how many radials, how
far, what post spacing, etc. in a dialog, and it would spit out the required
text files.  Sure, it's cool to use a sophisticated mapping program, but
there's a lot more that can go wrong.

5) There is no documentation about how HFTA works, in either the program
documentation, or in the Antenna Book.  There's a general description in the
book of the diffraction analysis, but no theory, and what's important, no
place to go look for a better description.  The textbook cited on GTD is all
well and good, but I wasn't looking forward to rederiving how HFTA might
work from first principles.

For any sort of modeling program, it's important that the theory be
described somewhere, or it's impossible to validate the program.  Say you
get some sort of output from HFTA... how would you verify that
independently?  For a program such as this, where the development budget is
presumably quite small (they're giving it away essentially for free, after
all), the value of legions of unpaid testers and validators would be
significant.  (The book mentions the work of Breakall, et al and their
modified version of NEC-BSC that they did field tests on, but doesn't say
whether HFTA actually uses the algorithms developed for that work.  The IEEE
A&P paper is fairly vague on the details of the implementation)  One reason
NEC is still popular after all these years is that there is copious
documentation on how it works.

6) there are a number of fairly obvious formatting errors in the dialogs
(Options dialog, where the caption text on the command button doesn't fit
and isn't readable).  Such things don't fill one with confidence about the
testing and validation process.

7) No documentation about how the "figure of merit" is calculated in HFTA

8) It's not clear what antenna pattern is being modeled in HFTA.  The book
makes a mention of a cosine squared pattern for the default 4 el beam, but
what's the pattern for the others?  Is it a cos^N type pattern? In
particular, what's the vertical pattern assumed.

Overall, a good start, but kind of a clunky distribution/installation
mechanism, and there needs to be some more documentation provided,
somewhere.

Jim Lux, W6RMK